Garrett's IST Blog

On June 7, 2007, tens of thousands of Penn State students logged onto their computers awaiting the release of student football tickets. Within fifty-nine minutes, over 21,000 tickets were sold. Thousands more were unable to get their tickets. Many of these students were then forced to purchase tickets at vastly inflated resale prices from other students, many of which don’t even attend the University Park campus. While I was able to get football tickets this year, many of my classmates and friends were, unfortunately, unable to do so. Acquiring football tickets for Penn State games is, quite simply, a fiasco.

The idea has been discussed before, but as a final for my English 15 class, I put together a working "model" of what an online, ID-card based electronic ticket system would look like. It doesn't utilize any fancy PHP or MySQL database technology, as it's not really necessary for a simplistic model such as this one. It's more of a conceptual depiction of the logistics of said system, and not so much a technical demonstration. Nevertheless, this idea has the potential to be fleshed-out into a full-fledged, working ticket management system.

Have a look.

So, we had our Second Life Dance Party tonight. And to be honest, I'm actually quite impressed with how it went. The attendance was much better than I thought we'd get, and the atmosphere was just great. The lighting was perfect, and it being night in Istania really helped set the mood. Kenton, you did a great job of finding that stream, and everyone, fantastic job on building stuff, and making this event as successful as it was.

And now, some screenshots:

That, and I won an IST mug and shirt! This is great.

Ever since my arrival here at Penn State, I've been told the merits of an online portfolio more times than I can recall. Not only a place to let a potential employer know more about yourself, one can also use it to break the mold of the one-page resume. Penn State has actually had an online portfolio promotional campaign going for some time now, and is the first search result on Google for "e-portfolio". After thinking about it for quite some time, I finally took the initiative to make one. It's hosted on my Penn State PASS webspace, viewable here.

It's still under construction, I'm going to be fleshing out a few of the sections, as well as probably adding a few more.

Nevertheless, I think it's a good start for a place to refer a potential employer to learn a bit more about me. Feel free to check it out.

Recently, I was approached by my mentor, and IST Student Government President Steve Garguilo with a rather interesting proposition. He asked me if I would be interested in taking a Teaching Intern position in next semester's SRA 111 class. Honestly, when I found out about this, I was quite surprised. I didn't know that freshman got asked to do such things. Anyway, as a TI, my duties will include attending all the classes, helping to coordinate learning activities with the instructor, and offering extra assistance to those who may need it.

Needless to say, I'm excited about this opportunity. It should be a good leadership experience to add to my resume, and, the two credits of IST 296 as compensation are nice, too.

This past Friday, I got to compete on Penn State's iCTF team, comprised of twenty members of none other than IST's IA Club. I was thrilled to have had the opportunity to compete with them, and eagerly looked forward to the competition.

From the iCTF website:

The contest, (known as "Capture The Flag") is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of students from both the attack and defense viewpoints. This is the 6th edition of the security exercise, and its largest version.

Each team is given an Internet server that provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included by the contest organizers.

The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase, by finding the vulnerabilities and fixing them in their own copy of the server. The teams will also leverage the vulnerabilities they found to compromise other teams' servers.

During the contest, an automated scoring system keeps track, for each team, of what services are available, and which services have been compromised (that is, "who is hacking who"). Points are assigned to the teams according to their ability to defend their systems and successfully compromise the systems of other teams.

At approximately 9 AM EST, we arrived at the apartment we were competing at. The server image was made available at 11 AM, and "open fire" at 1 PM. Unfortunately, it took us far longer to decrypt and install the image than we had hoped. And then, for reasons quite unbeknownst to myself, we had some difficulties in connecting our server to the competition VPN, thus making it impossible to attack other machines. Nevertheless, we had a great deal of the offensive and defensive teams working furiously to get it up, while the research team poked and prodded at the image to attempt to find vulnerabilities for when we finally got it operational.

Which, unfortunately, never happened. I did learn a lot, however, particularly in some areas pertaining to encryption technologies, Python, and WEP cracking. I look forward to what else I can learn in the IA Club, as well as next year's competition.

And now, some pictures (warning, crappy cell phone pics):

The offense side of the room.

The research team's setup.

We had our last IST 110H class today, and, I must say, it makes me a bit sad to see it all over. Some of my fondest memories of my first semester were in this class, and I'd like to think of it as a nice introduction of what's yet to come in my time as an IST student.

Although I'm not an honors student, I'm extraordinarily grateful to have had the opportunity to take this class. The low student-teacher ratio made learning extremely engaging and interactive, and facilitated a great deal of in-class discussion. I also feel like I know everyone in the class, at least, to some degree, unlike almost all of my other classes. Honestly, if all honors courses are structured in such a way, I'm going to be absolutely certain to explore what opportunities could be available to me through the Schreyer Honors College.

As for my group, well, simply put, it was great. None of us knowing each other prior to this class, we shared an excellent group dynamic, and had some great banter at project meetings. Altogether, we worked well, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to have met, and worked with my group. You guys rock.

My first semester here at Penn State has been absolutely fantastic. I've met so many new people, established so many new friendships, and had an unprecedented level of opportunities to take advantage of to further enrich my education. In just my first semester here, I've met former FBI agent and author Joseph Koletar, had lunch with FBI director Robert S. Mueller, heard a speech given by the illustrious Dr. Elie Wiesel, met Senator Rick Santorum, heard a lecture on Dell's direct-sales model from Americas President Paul Bell, discussed internships and intelligence analysis in a meeting with NSA analysts, made the IST IA Club's competition team, and gotten involved in more clubs and student organizations than I can list. And this is just the beginning.

So, Penn State, IST, bring it on. I can't wait to see what's around the corner.

In order to more accurately judge whether the Penn State University Libraries should invest in Second Life, Team Multivac decided to first explore a number of other library-related entities within Second Life, including Second Life branches of public libraries and libraries that don't even have a real-life presence, they exist solely within Second Life.

I chose to explore the latter.

A "places" search for "Library" yielded the Information & Communications Technology Library. Their website can be found here.

The facade of the library.

The library's interior.

Some of the scripts this library offers.

The primary purpose of this location is to provide a resource for information regarding Second Life. Custom scripts are available, as well as a book entitled "The Top 20 Educational Spots in Second Life". Among these are Harvard Law School, and Info Island, which is where the ICT library itself is located. Another interesting bit of information is "RL in SL", a list of real-life entities that have Second Life presences.

The library itself doesn't stand to gain much, it's a not-for-profit endeavor funded by contributions from users. While it may be limited, it certainly is an interesting place to explore.

For our sign representing what IST is all about, Team Multivac decided to create an IST history "tunnel" of sorts.

The frame of our creation.

Me applying a texture to one of our walls.

Us posing in front of our completed creation.

Walking through the tunnel, one can see, in chronological order, a brief history of the School and College of IST through pictures. Upon clicking these pictures, one is presented with a notecard item that gives a detailed description of that particular point in history.

Creating this project, I was tasked with uploading the necessary images to make textures for the tunnel. This was my responsibility because uploading images costs $10 Linden, and, I happen to be the only one with any money. Once the textures were uploaded, I applied them to prim objects that I had sufficient permissions to modify. Altogether, the process was a lot less painful than I initially expected it to be.

Be sure to check it out, and see Steve's Blog for a more elaborate writeup on the process of creating this work of art.

After struggling a bit to get Second Life working on my computer, I took the liberty of doing a little meandering here and there to get a feel for the environment, some of which I had done previously at the motorcycle event.

And boy, what an exciting few days it's been. I was present for the prostitute onslaught, I witnessed a cursing naked potato man running around with an M60 machine gun, and I've stumbled across, and even gotten kicked out of a few locales that wouldn't be entirely appropriate to mention here.

However, I digress.

One of the more.. kosher areas I stumbled upon was through a link found right in Istania itself. I had heard interesting things about Dell's Dell Island, and, I was certainly eager to check out their Second Life presence.

Upon teleporting to the island, I was struck by the imposing Dell logo atop a rather futuristic-looking bit of architecture.

Rather intrigued, I fly my way in the front door. Strangely, it's eerily empty here. I figured there'd be more people building ridiculous $5,000 Quad-Core QX6850 Core 2 Extreme-based computers. Honestly, I think Second Life could still manage to bring such a rig to its knees.

I wasted no time in hopping on one of their customization stations.. I was able to pick all the components of a PC to build, and watch as it assembled itself to my left. It was rather cool, and, after it was all complete, it offers to take you to a website where you can purchase said configuration.

All in all, this is certainly a unique business angle. It'd be fascinating to find out exactly how many of these Second Life-to-website click-throughs result in actual sales. This may very well become a very large avenue for generation of real-life sales for not just computers, but perhaps automobiles, and other consumer goods. The ability to try something out/view it in a virtual, three-dimensional environment could be instrumental in making such a purchase decision. I find it difficult to criticize Dell's environment simply because of the sheer innovation factor here.

I then meandered on over to IBM's Second Life presence. A search for "IBM" yields tons of results, so, I headed on over to the one simply entitled "IBM", which seems to be an online conference center of sorts, rather than a direct attempt at sales. This is indeed an intriguing prospect, however, it's disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a better means of navigating the island, or an introduction to what the island offers. This could be very helpful.

They've even got this neat little scale-model of the surrounding area.

And, over here, we've got IBM's massive, almost Death-Star-like "Theatre I". This leads me to believe that there are more. Wow.

There are seats there that one can sit in, so, presumably, this is a delivery area for lectures and seminars. I've yet to see anyone, but, then again, I don't imagine most companies would do business in such an area at 11:06 PM.

I find that I'm simply unable to explore the vastness of the IBM complex, let alone a sizable portion of Second Life. While it may be laggy, slow, and inefficient, to be this successful and huge, they must be doing something right. I do prefer Dell's environment simply because of the sheer coolness factor of assembling a virtual 3D representation of a consumer item, then being presented with the opportunity to purchase said item in real life. The most important element here I think is examining these sort of business "experiments" being conducted by these two companies. Whether it's Dell attempting to adapt its direct-sell model to online virtual environments, or IBM attempting to provide a venue for online business meetings, you've got to hand it to these guys for being pioneers. For trying something new. For making that first step forward.

And, now it's time to let my video card cool down. Second Life is making it throw a fit.

Every now and then, as I randomly stumble across the vast landscape of the internet, I come across something so relevant and pertinent to IST 110H, that I simply have no choice but to make a blog post about it. This is one of those instances.

First, some background:

Jonathan Harris is a computer scientist and digital artist. He has a penchant for using these talents to attempt to make some sense of the seemingly infinite personal data that exists on the internet. Two of these projects are Universe and We Feel Fine.

Universe traverses the current spectrum of news stories, and attempts to assemble a snapshot full of entity-relationships and all sorts of other fun stuff in order to help make sense of the collective consciousness of society.

We Feel Fine performs a similar task, but, perhaps more relevantly, it scours the blogosphere to attempt to gain a barometric reading of sorts of writers' feelings, and popular writing subjects. With direct linking ability to blog posts and images contained within these particular blogs, the power of such a graphical representation is not to be underestimated.

It's simply amazing what the result can be when such distinctly different skillsets (art and computer science) come together. With this sort of graphical analysis, one can very easily evaluate the current feelings of a group of people, which, most likely, reflects on society as a whole.

Check this out.